Actually, at the time I left for MacPorts, "brew analytics off" wasn't an option. Analytics was turned on without warning and without any obvious way to turn it off. They added an environment variable but still left it opt-out (on by default). I disagreed but users who complained were told that the decision was made and no further discussion would be allowed. [1]

> If you feel that way: please use another package manager.

I didn't like how it was handled. I think any sort of analytics, especially by third party companies with real capabilities for correlation and de-anonymisation should be strictly opt-in (off by default).

Opt-in doesn't really hurt users who don't care about privacy and security. Opt-out does hurt users who care about those things. Many organisations have security policies that discourage using software that "calls home". I'd trust the software much more if it didn't have that functionality at all.

The developer's justification was that if it was off by default, no-one would turn it on. I think that speaks volumes about how users feel about analytics these days. Some users suggested a Debian Popcorn style dialog ("We'd love it if you could help us gather some information about package usage, etc etc. Would you like to participate [y/N]", off by default but a question on first run asking the user if they'd like to help). We were told "no".

Overall, I thought it was a bad idea and the situation was handled poorly. For something as integral as a package manager I expect more.

[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/142#issuecomment-214...

Most people, myself included, never even heard about this before this point, because it's never mentioned as part of the installation or usage process and is opt-out—if you know it exists and that you might want to opt out in the first place.

Privacy violations and user tracking should always be opt-in not opt-out. If nobody opts in, one should rationalize why users may not want to be tracked or have their privacy violated and question whether making it opt-out is a good decision and respectful of their users.

I've found that a lot of people here in HN and Reddit are really passionate about not being tracked, so even if it was as easy as one command, the fact that Homebrew did it at all is enough to make some people not want to use it.

Nothing wrong with that viewpoint, but I just disabled it and moved on to enjoying pretty good software.

It has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is to disable. The problem is that it doesn't ask first, or even tell you what it's doing. OK, now that I know about it, I can turn it off, but how do I know they won't do something similarly ugly in a future version?

We do tell you about it before we start recording any analytics.

You do now, after people noticed what you were doing. You didn't then, when the GA integration was originally snuck in.